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Recent blog entries by wichert

Annoyances
Telfort still has no clue.. my cellphone still does not
work, and I have had no luck at all reaching them. Their
support number seems to be completely overloaded so I have
no way to reach them and complain loudly. It's probably time
to switch providers, and get a nice tripple-band GSM phone
at the same time.

Another annoyance that seems to get more frequent is
information that can't be released.. on occasion I get some
very nice information that I would love to tell everyone
(like the fact that Debian won the IDG/Linus Torvalds
community award) but am not allowed to tell anyone yet.
Probably an inevitable result of the fact that companies
are a part of the free software world now and the
accompanying worries about public image, appearance, etc.
Anyone remember when we were just simply hacking on
software? That feels like a long time ago..

Work
Finishing up little brother for Cistron. It seems to be
working pretty well, except for this little memory leak
we can't seem to find. We've been looking for it for quite
some time now, but it keeps eluding this. Having a
service monitoring tool take down the machine it is running
on is not exactly a feature we were looking for.. it
seems lb will be up and running soon though which means I
can focus completely on my new job. Whee!

I've been neglecting this for ages, and tali (no link yet, more people need
to convince her to create an account here or a webpage elsewhere :)
keeps mentioning that I should update it, so here we go..

Interesting thought for this week:

How would we react if Microsoft decided to release MS Linux,
based on Debian GNU/Linux?

I can't make up my mind as to what I should think about it..

Catching up
Returned from California only to find my grandmother in hospital and my
cellphone disabled. Very nice.. Seems the cellphone company (Telfort)
suddenly realized they never sent me the bills for march, april and may and
decided to disable my phone until I paid for them. How I was supposed to know
about those bills is still a mystery to me.. And of course they didn't bother
to mail me about that until a couple of days after they disabled it, and their
customer service number is nicely broken so I can't even complain to them. I'm
seriously thinking of switching provideres now. Luckily my grandmother is doing
much better then my cellphone and at this rate will make it to 90 just fine.

LinuxWorld
Last week was mostly filled with the LinuxWorld expo. I'm not going to do
a writeup of that, there are enough of those out there already. I'll just
note that the show was bigger then last time, but the booths were also a
lot bigger so in the end there wasn't much more to see. It also definitely
was more commercial, which makes it less interesting for my tastes. Debian
was all over though, thanks to our nicely timed potato release (and yes,
that timing was a lucky coincedent, we didn't delay or hurry the release
for this), lots of promotional help from OSDN and of course the fact that
Debian won the IDG/Linus Torvalds community award (is that the correct name
now? I've seen it named different things..)

Older stuff
I'm too lazy to write about everything that happened between the last
diary entry and this one.

Wow, I knew I hadn't writen a diary entry for some time now,
but it seems it's been a month already! Lots of stuff
happened in the meantime.. there was the Linux Expo in
Montreal, then a bit later another expo in Madrid. Both
nice shows, and in both cities a lot of friendly people.
Madrid seems to have a big contrast between cabdrivers who
seem to be most happy ripping of tourists, and other local
people who are really friendly. Just a tip for people
travelling: it definitely pays to try to contact local
developers. I've had a great time meeting other people on
all my trips. Just also be open to showing people around who
visit your area.

I arrived in Montreal on Saturday after a pretty
eventless trip. When
I got there it was raining, but a cab driver told me that it
would be
good weather the next day. Reality didn't agree though, I
woke up
on sunday to greeted by a snowstorm outside. Just what you
want when you
want to look around a city.. I ended up spending the
afternoon and night
to catch up on some strace work as well as cleaning up
doc-central for
its first public release. For those we haven't seen the
announcement
on debian-devel: doc-central is a small collection of python
scripts
that allows you to browse the documentation installed on a
Debian system
via a simple web interface. It still needs some work, but
mostly in areas
where I need help from others (any good html-designers
reading this? :).

The weather on monday was much better so it was time to
visit the
the expo and see what was happening there. After some fun
with getting
a badge (seems there computer didn't think I existed and
they had to
enter me all over again. With typos of course, so I am now
representing
`Deblan') got in only to see almost nobody there..
apparently monday is a
tutorial-only day and the expo floor doesn't open until
tuesday. I did
see Peter Ganten prepare his Wine talk and run internet
explorer under wine,
somewhat slow but definitely impressive. I think I need to
try it again
and see if I can't run my banking software with Wine now.. I
hate to
reboot my server just to use that.

It seems Advogato is being read a lot - I mentioned the
OpenNMS
project on friday and on sunday I got an email from them
stating
they were happy see that I mentioned them and promised to
improve
their website. I'm impressed a little diary entry here can
have
that much effect.

Just traveling
I'm not doing much today except packing up and spending long
hours flying to Canada.. with some luck I might catch up on
some
strace
work during the flight, but I'm not betting on that. Those
seats are just too cramped to be able to use a laptop.
Perhaps
catching up on sleep is a better plan, I could sure use
it.

Okay, the rest is actually yesterdays entry but I
didn't
submit it then..

Not my day..
This day just started out wrong.. it started by
discovering that the people from
the Linux Expo in Montreal apparently managed to mess up my
hotel
reservation and only booked me for half the week. At least
that's
what it says on the flight plan I received yesterday.. I
fired an email
off to them so lets hope it gets sorted out quickly. Then
someone
told me about the OpenNMS project which
seems to be doing the
exact same thing as the Little Brother project I have been
working
on for Cistron. Their
project
looks interesting, but there doesn't seem to be any code or
detailed
info beyond some marketing-speak. I think I'll just pretend
I don't
know about them and finish Little Brother :). I should
probably put
the code for that online somewhere before someone will
accuse me
of doing the same thing..

Debian on the move
Interesting stuff is happening on the Debian-frontend it
seems. IBM
and Alcove released a press release which mentioned that
Debian
is now the market leader with 27%. It doesn't list which
market or
where that figure comes from though, and the only similar
number I
can find is the result from a slashdot poll. Weird things
are happening
when the blue giant needs to rely on the reliable results of
a slashdot
poll..

I'm really happy with the current porting efforts as
well, it seems
that our mips port is progressing nicely (thanks to Florian
Lohoff
and Guido Guenther), so hopefully I'll get my new indy to do
something
useful soon. I also heard that the PuffinGroup (not part of
LinuxCare decided to
make
Debian their official PARISC port. Expect some cool things
coming from there! And finally tausq mentioned he build dpkg
for ia64. Now if
I could only get my hands on an ia64 to actually see
that..